SPLEEN is the personal blog of Stephen Judd

All posts tagged "news media"

A couple of weeks ago I was idly perusing my Twitter feed, as one does, and someone retweeted a tweet with this image and an anodyne, uninformative caption:

I was entranced, and immediately decided this one was going straight to the profile page.

Then a Twitter friend said "what a mensch", and I realised I had to find out more. Here is what I have learned.

The artist is Yehuda Pen. Pen was an artist who grew up in the Russian Empire, survived the revolution, and eventually was murdered, possibly for political reasons. He came from exactly the same kind of background as my mother's family, namely Litvak Jews.

The Wikipedia page gives a little summary of his life and some examples of his work. There is a far more extended bio at this site dedicated to Jews of Belarus (where he moved). He taught Chagall, among others.

Looking at his paintings, the people remind me strongly of the oldest family photographs we have, and even now, my relatives and their circles look like those people. I should say my surviving relatives: my maternal grandparents' families left Kovno (Kaunas) and Riga in the last years of the 19th century, probably because of the pogroms and increasing persecution, and made it to the UK, where they settled in Leeds. There is a little collection of postcards and letters that made their way to England but ceased by the 1930s. As far as we know, not one of those who remained in Europe survived.

The paper the sitter is reading is Der Fraynd (The Friend). It was one of many that started in the late 19th century but did not survive past 1912 when the Tsarist censors killed it.

It took me a while to puzzle this out because I am utterly useless at reading Hebrew letters, not having been brought up properly, and then my Yiddish dictionary uses standard YIVO spelling, and the masthead is spelled differently. Spelling didn't really standardise until the 1920s. But come on, the resh and the daled look almost the same...

People who aren't Ashkenazi Jews are often a bit confused about Yiddish. It is written with Hebrew letters, but it is not Hebrew. It split from German in the middle ages, but is not a German dialect. (The old gag "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" is so famous it now has its own Wikipedia page where you can read about how it was popularised by Yiddish linguist, Max Weinreich: "a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot".) Yiddish was its own thing, a Middle High German structure stuffed with Hebraisms and as time went on, more and more words from the surrounding Slavic languages. Jews who struck out from the Rhine area for further east took the German they had learned with them and then theirlanguage went its own way. Why people who had systematically adopted others' languages as they moved stuck with the German and built on it instead of taking up Polish or Russian is a matter of dispute.

Anyway, these newspapers were part of an emerging secular literary culture that got utterly smashed by the 1-2 punch of the Russian Revolution and then the Holocaust. Any native speakers you meet now are from tiny hardcore sects who are ultra-religious and won't be reading or writing secular stuff -- actually, you won't meet them, they don't mingle with other Jews, let alone gentiles. So now, that culture is an object of study, and I guess you might read Isaac Bashevis Singer in translation in some anthology or other, but that's it. Not quite a dead language, but the literature is dead. Hence why I wrote Yiddish was. I have a little bit, my daughter has none.

The other big cultural clue here is that the guy is drinking tea in a glass, just as my great grandparents might have. I wish I could explain the bag of white stuff, or the background, but I can't.

So this painting, this guy in the painting, I look at him, and I see not just a judicious student of the news, tranquil, with a smoke and a nice glass of tea. He's an ancestral figure, and yet someone who left no descendants.

My diminishing pool of regular readers know I don't really do political blogging these days, despite having a politics tag.

I was at this weekend's conference, and I've been surprised by some of the strong claims people are making about what happened.

So here's a few notes on some propositions I've heard asserted.

A 40% trigger is democratic/undemocratic

This depends entirely on how you choose to understand the impact of the rule.

Clearly, an end result is most democratic if it involves everyone. And with a lower trigger, it is more likely that there will be a process that involves everyone. Seen this way, a lower trigger fosters democracy.

On the other hand, within the caucus, a lower trigger hands power to a minority of caucus. In most democratic cultures, a simple majority is taken as the will of the whole. Seen this way, a lower trigger is undemocratic as it is against majority rule in the body where the vote takes place. Within the context of caucus, this is undemocratic.

I see merit in both these arguments and I'm not going to call their advocates bad people for disagreeing with me.

People who voted against the trigger hate democracy and the party

So, if we can disagree about what democracy demands, then we can't agree with this proposition unless we say "they hate MY version of democracy." And of course, people who think stability is a condition for the success of the party might well choose to make it less democratic and more successful because they love the party.

The vote on the trigger represents the Will Of The Labour Party

With a 27 vote majority out of I think 550 odd delegates at best it represents the will of slightly more than half the delegates, some of whom voted according to instructions from the bodies that sent them and some of whom exercised their conscience on the day.

The vote on the trigger is an expression of support for David Cunliffe

I was there and I talked to a number of people I am convinced sincerely believed that it represented maximally democratic option. I also know there was some heavy lobbying by people who are strong Cunliffe supporters.

So there was an unknown mix of motivations, no doubt some who thought only of democracy, some who thought only of Cunliffe, and some who thought of both. We don't know how those motivations were distributed among the delegates, or what arguments from whom led to those motivations. Therefore we can't infer that The Will Of The Labour Party is David Cunliffe. In fact as long as 15 delegates who supported the 40% trigger were motivated only by democratic arguments, then Cunliffe was supported by less than half the delegates... unless you think that some Cunliffe supporters voted against 40%, which is inconsistent with the claim that the trigger vote is an expression of support for Cunliffe.

We don't know why people voted for the lower trigger, and therefore we cannot say we know what that vote expresses about the intent of the voters or the party at large, however we might define that.

--

I think if people are going to argue about what happened, and about the meaning of what is going to happen, we should reflect on the difference between what we know and what we wish was so. And that goes for everyone.

I'm discouraged by the conviction with which journalists report their opinions as fact, and I'm equally discouraged by the way political bloggers and commentators have done the same, building on the journalists' reports. The Cunliffe vs Shearer story and the 40% vs simple majority story are intertwined, but they are not the same, yet we can't be sure where and how they overlap. I know I'm going to give a lot more credit to analysis that acknowledges these uncertainties instead of glossing over them for the sake of a clear story.

PS: there were some important constitutional changes on Saturday that will have major long term effects on the character of the party, but you won't read about them in any article I have read from a regular journalist so far.

PPS: to be very clear about my motivations, I think I sit near the left end of the party's policy spectrum. I don't see either Shearer or Cunliffe as sincere advocates for strong left policies, although I appreciate Cunliffe and this weekend Shearer have both courted that constituency, which is nice. Count me out of either camp, I have other goals in the party than getting my man or woman at the top.

This is actually an idea I've floated before. My Twitter peeps suggested I should reprise my proposal, I guess as food for thought for people who have more energy for this that I do.

Below are my notes on how I thought it could work. I'm coming from my particular political view point, a left one, writing for people who share that view point, but perhaps this is of wider interest anyway. You could certainly use this model without sharing my particular partisan interests.

The Society for the Promotion of Public Interest Reporting

The problem

New Zealand print and online media are dominated by right-wing ideas and shallow stories. Tight margins, private ownership and editorial bias in commissioning stories contribute to this. Genuine authorities with sound opinions are typically not accessible and not glib enough to be "go-to" sources of stories.

Editors who are pressed for resources have many attractive choices from privately-funded pressure groups and think tanks. Institutions like the Sensible Sentencing Trust, Family First and the Business Round Table have full time employees who are always ready with a good quote and free copy for those editors.

Many people believe that stories presenting left wing ideas and deeper analysis could gain a bigger share if the Left had equivalent institutions. The problem is that the Left does not have equivalent funding. A think tank or a not-for-profit newspaper is unlikely to enjoy sufficient sustainable income for even one full time staff member, unless and until a benevolent person endows a foundation for the purpose.

A solution

However, it may not be necessary to have a think tank or foundation with permanent staff to shift the balance of discourse. I propose a leaner solution that requires less institutional scaffolding: a non-profit body that pays existing freelance journalists to do what they are already doing, only more so. Let's call this body the Society for the Promotion of Public Interest Reporting (SPPIR).

a stipend for freelance journalists who exceed a pre-agreed publishing target

a per word subsidy on publication of stories that meet certain criteria

It is not clear to me which approach would be most successful, but these are not mutually exclusive.

The maths

SPPIR would be funded by members contributing on a regular basis. For example, 100 people contributing $50 per month would provide $60,000 per year. This could not sustain a foundation, but it could help keep two or even three freelance journalists in operation as comfortably as their permanently employed peers. Alternatively, at current freelance rates, it could fund at least two 5,000+ word articles per month.

The one paragraph pitch

Freelance journalism in New Zealand is now so badly paid that only writers with a genuine vocation can hack it. Those brave journalists already know how to sell stories, already have the contacts, already have form. What they really need and what SPIRR can give them is a little extra security. In return, we will get the stories told that we think need telling.

Next steps

SPPIR would comprise a non-profit structure such as a trust, with an unpaid board whose job involved the commissioning of articles, perhaps in response to pitches from journalists, and the evaluation of applications for a 6 month stipend or an article subsidy.

This is as far as my vision goes at this point. I am happy that I could solicit potential writers and supporters for such a venture, but I don't have the background to say what an appropriate legal structure would be, or to suggest a suitable initial board. This is where I need to turn to others to critique the idea, and if it still proves feasible, help flesh out the details to the point where SPPIR could be launched. I believe it is essential to have a sound constitution that assures people that SPIRR cannot easily be subverted, and an editorial board with the mana to assure people their funds will be spent wisely.

Postscript

Various people I discussed this with, notably Giovanni Tiso, Rob Stowell and Keith Ng made comments and suggestions. Keith I know has his own ideas which differ from (and may well be better than) mine, based on microfunding and donations on already written articles. Gio asked:

you make no mention of where this reporting would be published. What do you have in mind?

You're right, I really need to make this clearer. I have three possible options in mind:

1. We leave it to people to get published in normal channels, in the normal way, and their stipend or subsidy is contingent on pieces that meet our criteria being published in the mainstream. Hypothetical example: take say Jon Stephenson and his story that got published in Metro re the NZDF in Afghanistan. We'd say great, that meets our criteria, here is a subsidy of x cents per word that effectively increases your return and enables you to stay writing. Or, we could say great, you've met a target of x pieces published in mainstream media, here is another $15K for the next 6 months, do it again and we'll keep paying you. In other words, a subsidy for people to do what they already do, the way that they already do it.

2. We partner with a specific outlet, perhaps Public Address, or Werewolf, or more ambitiously Fairfax or APN, to provide feature articles of high quality.

3. We use a cheap online publishing platform, and make it a condition that commissioned articles be reprintable under some suitable a license, and then draw the attention of mainstream media to it -- hey, free articles! Which I guess is a variation on 2, but with less exclusivity for other outlets, but the possibility of building a brand. The essential thing here is trying to do something of what a think tank does, but without the overhead.

“The city council is trying to be reasonable, and we want to be reasonable, and there are many institutions where we have been able to stretch ourselves in terms of accepting solutions to satisfy the building code. Unfortunately, what Johnny Moore was asking for in terms of the bus, we weren’t able to go there with him because it was not acceptable in terms of the building code.” Stetson says Moore’s experience should be a lesson to others trying to set up temporary premises: get the engineering documentation right first time, and hire a project manager. The whole thing was painful for the council, too, he says. “Trust me, we made a loss on the whole experience, but we are bound by the Building Act.”

The thing is, I have no idea what the Building Act says. I have no idea what in law they have to put in an annual plan. I have no idea whether the council has to do the silly thing it's doing, or impose the silly restrictions it's imposing (or indeed whether they're that silly). And this goes for all sorts of compliance issues. My sources tell me that lots of apparently stupid things local government bodies do are mandated by central government legislation. But my sources aren't disinterested...

What would really help me is a nice, in-depth background piece that lets me figure out what sort of wiggle room a local authority has. If a council has to make a plan regularly, what kinds of things need to be in that plan, and how are they supposed to specified? If a council has to enforce building standards, what influence do they have over the standards?

If you write it, I promise I'll read it and I won't be bored at all, and I'll be much better informed. Thanks.

The Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung is a distinguished if conservative paper, and their arts column recently featured an article which I translate below. It's rough, and I'm not a native speaker, and a little rusty, but I think this might provoke some people to do their own research at least.

Imagine a country where they speak a language which hasn't been written down since its emergence. So first you have to find a way to write it, so you can publish books in this language, which has also only just happened in a few cases in the last maybe 10 years. A language which hasn't been translated into a single book in German. A language which even in its own country can only be read by less than 5% of the population (and written by even fewer; there are no accurate figures on this). In the best case the total number of readers of this language is about 200 000 people. The country in question is the guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair in the year 2012. It's called New Zealand. And the language is Maori.

Now one might object that the language of the indigenous people is in fact one of two languages of New Zealand, of which the other is English, and that the New Zealand literature which we are familiar with in this country -- Catherine (sic) Mansfield of course, Janet Frame, perhaps also Frank Sargeson or Patricia Grace -- was composed in English and has long been translated. But Jürgen Boos, the director of the Frankfurt Book Fair, in conversation with this newspaper left no doubt that New Zealand's guest appearance was about one thing above all: "It's the Maori culture which is being presented to us. I've just come to understand in the last few months that it's not lip service, the cultures overlap." So the absence of books from the book fair does not frighten.

Narrative media

Indeed it's probably a reaction to the big transformation the German book trade is undergoing, if Boos at yesterday's press conference for the guest of honour New Zealand highlighted the "transmedial [multimedia? dunno, not in my dictionaries] story telling" in Maori culture and therefore also promised a "transmedial mass performance" for October. In fact, the Maori have a rich narrative tradition, which isn't just transmitted orally but also through carving, textile art, tattoo, dance and painting. But which of these is appropriate for the fair itself, outside the guest of honour pavilion, which traditionally offers a multimedia presentation of the current country? The book fair boss cites workshops and exhibits, and above all films: "it's probably generally simpler to arouse interest in an author through film. That's a huge theme here at the book conference."

One can see that. Three costumed midgets stand at the entrance to the new house of books at Frankfurt -- a foretaste of Peter Jackson's pending Tolkien film "The Hobbit", the first part of which is supposed to break all movie records at the end of this year and gives a welcome reason to put on hobbit cosplay. Earlier editions of such costume competitions were at times the public exhibits that won the most participants at the fair. And for New Zealand, its reputation as a fantasy location is at least as important as the Sagas are for Iceland, which last year put on a universally praised guest country entry in Frankfurt. New Zealand has to measure up to that -- but apparently not literarily.

At that, Kevin Chapman, the head of the New Zealand publishers assocation can proudly announce that sixty authors -- obviously mostly English-speaking -- will come to Frankfurt and by the fair up to 100 books from his country -- obviously in English -- will be newly translated. Up until now it was only around ten a year. Nonetheless, it's a vanishingly small number in comparison to other guest countries.

It shows the lack of daring on the German side that a wonderful novel like "Gifted" by Patrick Evans has found no German publisher, although since its appearance in 2010 in New Zealand it has been celebrated for its subtle depiction of the legendary cohabitation of the two authors Frank Sargeson and Janet Frame in the years 1956/57. But then Evans isn't first on the travel list for Frankfurt at all. By contrast Alan Duff was just recently a New Zealand author on an official junket in Germany, uniting the advantages of having Maori descent and having written the book that led to the film "Once Were Warriors."

It hinges on food and drink
Many of the hundred hoped-for new translations will be travel and cook books. That's wholly in keeping with the New Zealand government's intentions. The speech given by Lisa Futschek, the acting ambassador in Germany, gave a foretaste: no word about literature, everything revolved around food and drink in New Zealand. Even for Jürgen Boos this was too transmedial, especially since Ms Futschek didn't once offer the obligatory Maori greetings, which otherwise were compulsory at this exhibition.

We by contrast will learn some broken Maori this autumn at the book fair, that's for sure. But whether the guest country's programme will succeed in transmitting the seriousness of its cultural concerns beyond the allure of the exotic? We have certainly become more open to new forms of narrative in recent years. But at a book fair, it's the books that count.

A comment on the Dim Post made me wonder what proportion of people polled in political opinion polls don't know, don't respond, or otherwise opt out of making an explicit call for a party.

Thanks to Lyndon Hood who pointed me at TV3 poll results, I was able to find the following data, which is very interesting.

Poll results as reported in headlines

Feb 2009

April 2009

Aug 2009

Oct 2009

Dec 2009

Feb 2010

April 2010

Labour

27

30

29.3

27.2

30.8

29.6

33.8

National

60

56

58.1

59.9

55.2

56.3

52.1

NZF

1.6

1.3

1

1

1.5

1.5

1.5

Green

7

6.1

7.5

6.9

7.8

7.3

8.2

ACT

1.2

2.1

1.4

1.7

1.8

1.6

1.6

MP

2.1

2.9

1.2

2.4

1.7

2.4

1.9

Base

949

947

911

917

893

910

874

Poll results with percentages reflecting don't know and won't vote

Feb 2009

April 2009

Aug 2009

Oct 2009

Dec 2009

Feb 2010

April 2010

Labour

25.6

28.4

26.7

24.9

27.5

26.9

29.5

National

56.9

53.0

52.9

54.9

49.3

51.2

45.5

NZF

1.5

1.2

0.9

0.9

1.3

1.4

1.3

Green

6.6

5.8

6.8

6.3

7.0

6.6

7.2

ACT

1.1

2.0

1.3

1.6

1.6

1.5

1.4

MP

2.0

2.7

1.1

2.2

1.5

2.2

1.7

Don't know/Won't vote

5

5.3

8.9

8.3

10.7

9

12.6

The first table shows percentages of the people who gave a preference. The "base" row is the number of people out of 1000 who did so. That's why the percentages sum roughly to almost 100%. I say "almost" because I omitted the tiddlers for brevity's sake, who never account for more even 2% of those who gave a preference in any of those polls.

That "base" row is very interesting. Lots of people aren't included in those headline percentages. In the last poll, more than 1 in 10 people didn't state a preference.

So I made the second table. It restates the data as percentages of the whole 1000 polled, showing those who responded don't know or won't vote as well.

What you can see is that if you report the results the way the news media typically do, it looks as though in April 2010 the coalition parties -- National, ACT and the Māori Party -- still had majority support. Their supposed percentages add up to 55.6%. But if you report the true figures, you can see that they've only got 48.6% -- a clear minority.

I think it's fine to omit the don't knows or won't votes if they're an insignificant number of people, but once they hit more than 10% it surely is worth reporting. For instance, in that last poll, there are more people who don't know or won't vote than there are Green, Māori, NZ First and ACT combined.

Apart from that, this gives a very misleading impression of support for the government. They weren't supported by a majority of voters at all.

As I find myself saying a lot these days, it's very disappointing, though not surprising.

New Zealanders are evenly divided over whether the price of alcohol should be increased to discourage drinking, a move already ruled out by the Government.

Really? How do we know that?

... a Fairfax Media survey of readers last week found they were divided over the wisdom of increasing alcohol tax. Of the 1445 people surveyed, 48 per cent agreed alcohol prices should go up by 10 per cent. The same proportion disagreed.

I emailed Vernon Small to ask what a Fairfax Media Survey is, and he told me it's a survey of their readers panel of the Dominion Post, Press and Waikato Times. I emailed back to ask whether this meant that the survey was of a self-selected sample, and not a random representative sample of New Zealanders. As we all learned at school, unless you have a proper random sample, your survey is biassed and unscientific and it certainly wouldn't be news.

I guess Vernon's pretty busy because I haven't heard back, but I can tell you anway: Fairfax reader panels are made up of people who sign up to answer surveys in return for going into a prize draw. See for yourself.

The views of people who fill out 6 surveys a month in return for shopping vouchers are no doubt very interesting but they are hardly going to be representative of people at large.

I think it's dishonest to report the results of any survey like this as "New Zealanders are evenly divided". And it's plain lazy to use what amounts to your private marketing focus group and then report that as though it were news. Especially when things are actually happening out there.

"Since the Government raised the issue of property tax changes in August last year, there has been an increase in the exodus of landlords from the rental market, mainly landlords who have been in the market for a long time," Mr Boberg said.

"They have sold their properties to owner-occupiers so those homes are lost to the rental market."

Um, where do these owner-occupiers come from? Aren't most of them going to be people who used to rent? Even if they aren't, what happens to the houses they used to live in? I'd love to know if Anne Gibson, the reporter, asked anything along those lines.

Further questions: why is one real estate agent's half-baked idea news? And "national" news at that?

I meant to add a bit more last night, but I was too zonked to think clearly about it.

Postman seems to say that with television, the entertainment via an ever-changing sequence of blocks that cause emotional stimulation is the thing. (This is why news shows need theme music and expressive newsreaders -- without the music and the mugging for the camera, you'd have to figure out how to respond to the news yourself, and that wouldn't be so entertaining).

For me web browsing is similar, but different in an important way. There's still an ever-changing sequence, and there's still a lack of connection and context. Eg, sites like Metafilter (or digg or Fark or YouTube or BoingBoing or even the highbrow Arts and Letters Daily) present us with one thing after another, with no connecting thread of argument or thought. Sometimes, what they present is thematically connected, but often it's not. In contrast to television the entertainment is often not in the emotional content, but in the receipt of a novel packet of information. The text can be dense, the sense rich.

Last week I got a 30% off voucher from Borders, so I wandered down to see whether I could find anything I wanted. This violates my usual book buying policy, which is recherché books online, bestsellers at Borders, and browsing at Unity. But... 30% off.

I ended up with a copy of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death.

I first encountered Postman when I acquired a copy of a lecturer's course notes while working as an IT support person at the School of Education at the University of Waikato. In those days, there were still some hardy Marxists who had survived the merger of the university's Department of Education with Hamilton Teachers' College, and I would talk with them as I fixed their computers. (For all I know they are still locking horns with their vocationally orientated colleagues, and I hope so.) Anyway, these notes contained a lengthy and fascinating excerpt from this book, which has been on my "must read someday" list ever since.

Postman's argument goes more or less like this:

different media favour different modes of discourse

print favours sequential, logical argument and dense information

electronic media, starting with the telegraph and culminating in television, favour disconnected snippets, light on information, chosen largely for emotional impact, and produced for entertainment above all else (the book predates widespread internet by more than a decade)

television as the dominant medium has a devastating effect on public discourse, as it replaces argument with entertainment

this is why politicians' policy positions have become subordinate to their ability to connect emotionally with the public on camera

There's more to it than that, of course.

Postman's account of the news show as vaudeville performance, whose reference to real events is only for the purpose of stimulating entertaining emotion, is as true now as it was when he wrote it. His description of the weakening attention span of the public -- from the book-reading, lecture-attending, Sitzfleisch of the 19th century to the channel-surfing 20 second boredom -- is damning.

At the end of the book, he suggests that there are two answers, one nonsensical, one desperate. The nonsensical one would be to start producing shows that deconstruct television, showing the audience how it manipulates their emotions and constructs argument out of nothing more that sequences of shots. He argues that such a show would have to be itself entertaining, or it could never be funded and broadcast, and that it would be funny along the lines of Monty Python and other shows that mocked television convention. "In order to command an audience large enough to make a difference, one would have to make the programs vastly amusing, in the television style. Thus the act of criticism itself would, in the end, be co-opted by television. The parodists would become celebrities..." Well, hello Jon Stewart.

The desperate answer, according to Postman, would be to add education about the workings of television to the school curriculum. I have no idea whether this has happened or not, but I think that's what the fuddy duddy complaints about media literacy in the English syllabus are about. But judging purely by, say, the content of the comments on the NZ Herald site and Stuff, it's not working.

In summary, Amusing Ourselves to Death is a depressing read.

I find it interesting to try to extend the book's message to the web-dominated milieu I live in. I've forsaken the emotional farce of "serious" television for the textual web. It's hopeful, isn't it, that densely argued text is fighting a rear-guard action against television? I don't know. LOLcats and Youtube make that a dubious position to hold.

But anyway, I've decided to extend my entertainment fast a little further. I have held out against Twitter and Facebook quite happily, but that still leaves massive gobblers of my attention: certain blogs and news sites I find myself checking multiple times a day, like Metafilter and Public Address System. I'm taking a break from them for a while too. At least until March. Maybe longer. I've been getting my willpower muscle back into shape, and now I'm going to exercise it a bit harder.

I'm beginning to believe that the New Zealand Herald is a threat to public welfare.

For a long time now it has stoked fear of crime through its prurient reporting. More than one researcher has noted that while the murder rate in New Zealand is declining, space devoted to murder reportage is going up. Over at Editing the Herald, James diligently documents the continuing bullshit campaign from the Herald. They bury the news about the falling murder rate while blaring the gory details of the worst and rarest crimes as though they were commonplace.

But the Herald, not content with scaring the pants off its readers, tries to whip them up by attacking our justice system.

A classic example in the last two day's web browsing: Herald reporter Jared Savage writes breathlessly that a defendant's gang connections were withheld from the jury until after conviction. Jared and his editor presumably know why this is so, and have heard of the concept of "a fair trial", but they don't cover this. The judge's comment is carefully scare-quoted. The "Your Views" topic and the replies are sadly predictable.

I thought I'd see how NZ ranks in per capita murders -- the most reliable indicator for violent crime when comparing countries. The answer is, pretty well. But my friend Julian pointed out a marvellous comment buried down the bottom of the page, presumably from the NZ Herald target demographic:

NZ should be in a worse place than that, our crime is out of control. We have more murders than that we have around 1-2 a week here. (thats the start there is a whole lot of other crime here, read nz herald thats all we have is crime in the paper) The justice system is a disgrace, you get 8-10 years here for murder..and the murder of kids here is appalling, do not raise a family here. In fact do not live here I want to move away fast.

Newspapers often defend themselves on the grounds that they have a civic function, that they serve the public. How is the public being served by their disinformation campaign about crime and justice? How are we served by being frightened? What kinds of bad decisions will be made because of the Herald's misleading reporting?

We read and hear a lot from Bob McCoskrie of "Family First" these days.

Do you know how many members Bob McCoskrie represents?

A thousand? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? After all, considering how much publicity he gets, he must be the spokesperson for a large constituency?

Actually, the number is: zero. None. He represents a membership of no one at all. To be fair, Family First does have a "Board of Reference" comprising 21 people, so I guess they kind of count. (Details here).

Family First does claim to have about 6,000 people on their mailing list. These people contribute nothing to the organisation's policy, nor have they indicated any support other than a willingness to receive email from Family First.

Let me put that in perspective for you. In the last general election in New Zealand, 13,000 people voted for the Bill and Ben Party. 9,500 people voted for the NZ Legalize Cannabis Party. I myself run mailing lists for one of New Zealand's least-known martial arts and have several hundred people on them. We are not talking about a mass movement here.

Now Bob himself lists these qualifications:

several years teaching in secondary schools and tertiary institutions, working as a social worker with young people in South Auckland for more than 15 years, and engaging with the issues of the day on talkback radio.

I think we could find a lot of ex teachers, and social workers, and indeed people who engage with issues on talkback radio, whose views are as interesting and dare I say as well-founded as McCoskrie's. So why does he get the column inches?

I don't know about you, but I'm curious about what makes his stream of releases to the media worthy of reprinting when so many other groups and people, with larger memberships and better qualifications struggle to be heard.

I'm also curious about the role of lobby groups that don't have members. Why are these groups, with their mysterious backers and tiny memberships allowed such a prominent voice in our public discourse?

Could I, do you think, print up some letterhead and sign you all up to my mailing list and get the column inches with a press release a day?

I am a big fan of James Coe's Editing The Herald, a blog which is "... dedicated to getting angry at things printed in each day's New Zealand Herald". Said anger manifests in a delightfully snarky and intelligent way.

Today's post concerns the Herald's coverage of crime stories, a subject dear to me. In today's post he nails the thing that really bugs me about our news media's obsession with crime stories.

...people, when surveyed, massively overestimate both the level and increase (the speed and acceleration, if you will) of violent crime in this country - and media coverage of crime is at least partly to blame. Of course, in some sense any violent crime is too much, but it seems to me that there are a lot of of negative consequences of this: a siege mentality, a lack of trust in fellow citizens, and an increase in racism and popular support for draconian, expensive and ineffective policy.

I am beginning to think it might be worth choosing a field of expertise and then send a few press releases off to the Herald. Then I can harvest some newspaper-generated credibility too, like the racist fantasist Doutre. I have written to the journalist concerned:

Wayne,

Are you aware that Martin Doutre is not merely, or perhaps not even "a researcher", but a noted crank and pseudo-scientist whose beliefs have some pretty nasty racist undercurrents?

It is very unfortunate that you have simply referred to him as a "researcher", which will provide him with enough credibility and validation to fuel further effort in spreading race-baiting ignorance. I hope that in future when you write about Doutre you will be able to bring some skepticism to bear.

Thanks to Julian for the tip-off.

Of course, when I say "newspaper-generated credibility", I am making the assumption that one gains credibility by being written up in the Herald like this. Perhaps the transfer of credibility runs the other way. Many more credulous articles like this and I'm going to start assuming that the Herald is composed of unpleasant fantasy and need not be taken seriously.

I couldn't help but laugh sardonically at the line "overwhelming public believe that the crime rate is increasing."

If that's true, it's because of the "if it bleeds it leads" editorial policy of the nation's news media.

I realise this isn't your fault personally, but perhaps your next stories could look at how the ratio of crime coverage to actual crime over the last two decades has led to the public being so misinformed. (It's true, by the way -- there's been academic research on this for several years now).

There was one glaring omission from your story -- no quote from Garth McVicar! Did he not immediately bust out a press release about this important story on violent crime? Gosh, I wonder why.

Update: on re-reading, I see my email to Mr Collins was so hastily composed as to be barely coherent, which makes it all the more surprising that I received a polite and friendly response. Anyway, dear reader, the reason for my temporary loss of grip on the principles of the English language is this: this kind of thing makes me very cross. STEPHEN SMASH! Thank you.

Gratified to be told by a colleague today that he heard my name and a correction read out on the radio this past Sunday, presumably as a result of the email I sent to National Radio about Richard Prebble's repeated lying. No word on whether future Prebble interviews will be accompanied by real-time fact-checking as I suggested to them.

Didn't catch it myself. I was being hungover in the Tararua foothills.

So I turn on the car radio in time to hear Richard Prebble claim excitably that Kiwibank has never made a profit. Chris Laidlaw then said "but surely many others around the world are in the same situation", implying agreement.

About this motorway shooting business. I see that both Stuff and the New Zealand Herald sites have prominent boxes on their stories about the shooting, asking readers to get in touch with them if they witnessed it or have pictures. No mention of contacting the police.

I've noticed this in the past. Sometimes they get around to putting a police hotline number in there, but mostly they don't.

I wonder how it affects building a prosecution case, or the fairness of trials, if a newspaper snags important evidence first?

Fairfax New Zealand group executive manager Paul Thompson confirmed a meeting occurred with real estate bosses. They were "feeling bruised at the moment" over negative headlines about the property market and industry reforms.

Personally I don' t believe that the newspapers are likely to cave to threats from them, if only because I can't see where else the real estate people are going to advertise...

But anyway, I don't recall any objections from the real estate industry to the breathless reports of house price rises, the property shows on tv, or any of the other publicity that helped fuel the bubble. Perhaps next time around, they'll lobby editors not to overdo it, to make sure that their price graphs show long term as well as short term trends, and to give equal time to disinterested parties who might point out the risks of putting all your dough into one leveraged asset that's well above its historical average. But I doubt it.

Thank goodness the Herald Newsdesk is at the forefront of solving crime and tracking down the perpetrators. That's why you should always tell them straight away if you know anything.

I believe there is some goverment agency or other which sometimes collects information on these events, but if it was important to tell them, I'm sure the Herald would have mentioned their contact details.

I didn't do much productive this weekend, but I did hack up a little wotsit which shows the top terms from the past year's news, animated day by day.

Words are sized according to their freqency, the commoner the bigger; and the more consecutive days they appear, the further they migrate from the centre. Words are placed around the middle according to alphabetical order, so you can watch for them. The data has been culled from the Ruminator.

There's about a megabyte of data to download in the background. I'm also not sure how well it works in Safari or IE. Feedback welcome.

There is some work to do tidying it up to a point where it is useful to me, but it struck me immediately how it has already teased out a lot of stereotypical journalese, and the subjects that have been of most concern in the last year.

Also, "a man" gets into HEAPS of trouble. Experts say a lot. And concerns are growing.

Actually, everyone's texts are to be wiped, including the vast majority of the public who are not criminals. A more appropriate headline would have been "Your texts are private again", or "Widespread privacy violations to stop."

The Dominion Post's obsession with crime is leading it to an editorial stance which completely forgets about the rights of the public. Imagine if the police wanted to have NZ Post photocopy and retain on file all letters sent. That's exactly like what's being proposed with texts.

We wouldn't tolerate keeping copies of letters, or recordings of all calls. Perhaps that's because our expectations were set when those technologies were new, and copying wasn't feasible. It worries me how the police are quick to get in on the ground floor with new technology before concerns about abuse can be examined.

(On the side, I've noticed that the DomPost's editorial policy seems to be to use the word "crim" in headlines wherever it possibly can).

Around the time when we crashed out of the Rugby World Cup (see, I am a New Zealander, I used the word "we") there was an NZPA article quoting someone from Rape Crisis concerned that there would be more violence against women in the aftermath of the game.

Various people were skeptical of this and wondered whether there was in fact any research behind this notion.

It's not exactly on point, but researchers are on the case. (Full PDF).

There is a great deal of anecdotal evidence that college football games can
lead to aggressive and destructive behavior by fans. However, to date, no
empirical study has attempted to document the magnitude of this
phenomenon. We match daily data on offenses from the NIBRS to 26
Division I-A college football programs in order to estimate the
relationship between college football games and crime. Our results
suggest that the host community registers sharp increases in assaults,
vandalism, arrests for disorderly conduct, and arrests for alcohol-related
offenses on game days. Upsets are associated with the largest increases in
the number of expected offenses. These estimates are discussed in the
context of psychological theories of fan aggression.

Good news, I think. If the best that can be managed is simple firearms charges, then nothing too terrible is afoot. On the other hand, a lot of what's been stewing in my head has evaporated, so I'm going to wait a day or two before I deal with:

I think my principles are broadly: don't believe in initiating violence at a personal or collective level, although self-defence is justified. I definitely don't believe in it as a means of effecting political change. (Even if I didn't have moral objections, it usually turns out to be counter-productive).

So this is among the things giving me the most heartache. If those who were arrested turn out to have been plotting violence against my fellow citizens, I'm not going to be able to support them, beyond the humanitarian concerns I have for all prisoners. I'm not going to march for the right to shoot people.

It worries me that I haven't heard a firm denial of violence yet. It would be out of character for the people I know who are involved though. And I imagine lawyers are keeping their clients quiet on purpose. Equally, we haven't had a clear statement from the police on this head either. Just a bunch of leaks and rumours. I hate that. I hate that I have the same urge to gossip as a lot of other people. It's hard not to though.

Maori Sovereignty and race relations

Mmm. That means a lot of different things to different people. I'm not entirely sure how well this really could work.

Back when I still wanted to be a lawyer, I did a law intermediate year, and one of the things we learned about was the Treaty of Waitangi. That was my first real inkling of the enormously unjust history of New Zealand. So once this had sunk in I marshalled my budding law student skills and hectored my (Labour voting, Springbok tour protesting) Dad with my new knowledge. And Dad looked at me and said: "If I thought Tainui wanted this house back, I would buy a gun."

I feel for Tuhoe and I would support them having an independent territory. My inner happy optimist thinks: If it didn't work out, they could rejoin the rest of us. If it did, maybe all we'd want to move there? I don't know. I do have one particular problem with some visions of tino rangatiratanga, and that's hereditary aristocracy. When you have land permanently in the control of a small hereditary group, you get aristocrats. And that's a bad thing. I believe everybody has the same blood inside.

Anyway, tying this back to the violence, while I will still support most kinds of redress for confiscation and dodgy land sales, I can't get behind shooting to achieve it. (Even if I thought it would work, which it almost certainly wouldn't, any more than it did in the 19th century).

I'm not too conflicted about these issues though. Tuhoe have been done wrong in the past, and it looks like a lot of people in Ruatoki have been done wrong now. Whether or not Iti and friends are guilty of terrorism (or just playing silly buggers in the bush) doesn't change that.

But what about the police? I'm going to leave that for tomorrow. I think I'm going to try and tease out some distinctions between police officers and the police force and think about how institutional imperatives make certain behaviours inevitable.

For much of my adult life Ross Meurant might as well have been the bogeyman. So I was utterly gobsmacked to read his article today, which I commend to you. Here is a man who has thought about his life, examined it, and reached new conclusions.

There are many choice observations in his piece, but this particularly struck me:

There is a fundamental flaw in the present legislation where it allows a subjective test of police information by police, to form the basis of reason to catapult us onto a terror alert footing. It is even more disturbing to me when I know type of environment where these decision are made, is deep in the forest. What the police are effectively saying is:

"In the Ureweras there are weapons of mass destruction. Trust us."

Sound familiar?

Several commentators (Russell Brown, Chris Trotter, Bomber Bradbury among others) in the last two weeks have hinted that they have inside information that really dark deeds are afoot. They are vague about their sources and even vaguer about what they have been told.

Those people maybe should consider how the Iraq war was legitimised in the American press by journalists entranced at the insider info they were getting — which turned out to be entirely wrong.

Update: that could be a tad harsh. I suppose what I'm thinking is that when people with a profile pass on rumours, whether they are entranced or not, those rumours have an unfortunate tendency to take on the hue of fact, and that's not really doing the public interest a favour, although as always, it's surely what the public are interested in.

Up until this morning I was prepared to wait and see. Maybe the police had over-played their hand, but maybe they were really on to something. Then I got an email from someone I trust, about someone else whom I also know and trust, who had their house searched and their PCs and cellphones confiscated. The rumour then turned out to be true.

I found this interview from National Radio with Derek Fox portrayed events in an entirely different light. He made the point that camo gear, unlicensed weapons and ammo are everyday features of life around Ruatoki where people regularly hunt. Tame Iti has been receiving goverment funding for camps in the Ureweras to teach bushcraft and survival skills. At this stage, everything the police have actually confirmed has a non-terrorist explanation. And Fox filled in the gaps on the history of Tuhoe and their land, which wasn't news to me, but has received little coverage in the press.

I am now starting to reach some tentative and unpleasant conclusions.

The police really are on a "round up the usual suspects" fishing expedition. That's an abuse of police powers.

When the police raid houses in Ruatoki they go in with the Armed Offenders Squad and bust in shouting. When they visit houses owned by Pakeha in Taupo, standard uniform officers knock on the door. That's racism. (Update: or is it? Good point made by David F.)

Neo-nazis in New Zealand also play war games in the bush. They have a history of vandalism, violence, intimidation and firearms offences. They boast online and offline about preparing for race war. But the police don't seem interested in pursuing the terrorist angle there at all. But Maoris with guns? They must be terrorists. That's racism.

Someone is leaking scary rumours like a sieve, and the news media are lapping it up. We are being failed by journalists who are not applying any skepticism at all, either to the police or to others. I mean, who gives a shit what Bomber Bradbury hints at on his blog? Is that news? I'm not buying the angle that it's news that there's a rumour. There's a lot of rumours out there, and I rely on journalists to sort the wheat from the chaff, not to dump a whole more chaff.

If I'm wrong about points 1-4, and the police are right, there must be something horrible just under our noses. So I don't want to be right, and I don't want to be wrong.

I am absolutely prepared to believe that Iti is a nutbar with plans to shoot people, but there's easier, lower-key ways to deal with him than this. In some quarters he will be a cause celebre now.

It looks as though we're going to see the same erosion of civil rights and climate of unjustified fear here that Australia, the UK and the US have experienced. I'm not sure what to do about it yet, but I'm thinking.

...TVNZ said it had found "voting irregularities" in the ballots cast by members of the public.

Voting had closed for the competition, but during the routine check of the emailed ballots, it was found some had come from invalid email addresses, or without the authorisation of the owners of the email addresses.As a result, TVNZ had to invalidate the vote, and start again with a fresh system.

It's amazing that TVNZ would go with a simple vote via email. Someone in the organisation must know that you cannot, over the normal internet infrastructure, rely on an email being from its ostensible sender. Don't they get spam at TVNZ?

It's unsurprising that people would game such a wide-open system, when the prize is worthwhile.

Details of the false emails have been referred to the police.

If I were accused of vote fraud in this competition, my first defence would be that no one could be expected to take such a stupid system seriously.

Now, how would I do it? Set up a website that sends a message to the user asking them to confirm their vote by pointing their web browser at a URL with a unique code. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Far, far harder to defraud, and surely cheaper and less annoying to users than rejigging the competition and engaging someone to set up a txt-based service.

Fifteen years is not a significant anniversary, I would have thought. And when the Herald began this story they discovered that no one had anything to say about it. In fact, there was no actual news in this at all. So what was the point? I think they must have run out of new violence porn so they went through the archives to see if they could re-run some old stuff.

This claim is simply untrue. DDT has never been banned where malaria is endemic. In devloped countries, it was only banned after malaria had already been eliminated. Where its use has declined in the third world, this is because it has become ineffective as mosquitos evolve resistance. Indeed Rachel Carson's Silent Spring pointed out that DDT was being overused as its effectiveness as an insecticide declined.

It reflects poorly on the climate skeptics that they advance this untruth in support of their own views. And while interviews should represent what the subject has said, it's disappointing that those claims which are easily verified were not checked.

That aside it's been a pretty interesting week. I started at Peace on Tuesday, and boy there is a lot to learn. The job itself is hacking up something to manage the complicated shenanigans that happen when you deregulate power companies - all sorts of players send each other all sorts of messages about all sorts of things. Add in what seems like every Java API ever released by the Apache project and my head is spinning. But it's all good, like the mental equivalent of bracing runs and a hard day's honest work with a shovel.

Somewhat less good is the discovery of the Auckland commuting overhead. The new workplace is in the CBD. It turns out that parking costs $10 a day. If you bus, it costs $6 return. It has come as quite a shock after walking to work every day. I hadn't realised that the small increase I had managed in my rate would be seriously dinged merely by transportation. It is interesting though - it's easy to see that if you live much further out than I do, and you (as most people would) ignore non-petrol costs for your car, public transport really isn't very compelling. It doesn't surprise me at all that most people drive, for all the inconvenience of the traffic.

Still, I've only been driving because of Hannah's ankle. She walked to school today, and as soon as this cold's gone, I'll be biking. I can't wait. Peace actually provide a locked bike-room in the basement, which is most enlightened, but there were only two bikes in it today, even though it was fine and sunny. And one of them belongs to Bruce, who sits across from me and also started on Tuesday. I was a bit startled to see him, because we were both in the web team at BNZ in Wellington. It's a small world, blah blah. Anyway, I conclude that I have a much lower tolerance for traffic than the average punter. The last time I did the Greenlane to CBD run on a bike regularly, I observed that I was beating cars and buses into town, so I might as well get the exercise and save the money.

The TV is on and we were just asked "Are you worried that your kids watch too much tv, are eating the wrong things, and aren't getting enough sleep?" Strangely the advice was to sign up for a New Zealand version of Honey We're Killing The Kids, whereas I would have said turn off the tv, stop feeding them shit and send them to bed. I'm a terrible hypocrite though. I love these finger-wagging schadenfreude spectaculars and although I am very sympathetic to human frailty I can't wait to cluck my disapproval at the parental incompetents they trawl up. My name is Stephen and I am a Smug Bastard. Wid a code.

A quick bout of googleage reveals that New Zealand's infant mortality rate is pretty stable, but if anything it's been dropping slightly since 2000 (annoying Flash graph ). Which says to me that there's nothing going terribly wrong with childbirth in New Zealand, apart from a terrible fascination in the news media with grieving parents and their dead babies. So my advice to any expectant couples is: turn off your television, don't read the paper, listen to music stations and keep your browser on nice things. And have a midwife and feel good about that choice, if you want.

While I'm feeling grumpy about journalists and their inability to ask obvious questions, how about this story, which strongly implies that there is something fishy about midwives. Now what would really settle this for me is not the useless information that there have been lots of deaths under midwives' care in the last few years - of course there have been, because midwives are now the lead maternity carers at far more births. What we need to know is how death rates with midwife LMCs compare to death rates with GP LMCs. For all we know, the cases summarised in the article represent a very low rate of error and reflect just how good care is. I'm going to blame Martin Johnston for not finding this essential information.

The Government is examining a proposal to have children tagged and numbered in a central database to stem abuse and failure at school.

Personal details of every New Zealand child, including welfare and health concerns, would be entered into the database, to be shared by schools, social agencies and health authorities.

It would be similar to Scottish and British initiatives, with a single ID number issued for each child, enabling authorities to be alerted to potential problems.

Social Development Minister David Benson-Pope said he had sought advice on setting up such a scheme here.

"I am interested in ensuring that children do not fall through the gaps and that our monitoring of young people is as coordinated as possible."

... Investigations by commissioners into child murders, such as those of half-sisters Saliel Aplin and Olympia Jetson, had blamed a lack of information-sharing among agencies, [Children's Commissioner Kiro] said. "We've got to get to a point where we stop picking up the pieces when everything goes wrong and start putting things in place to stop it from happening."

This is idiocy. And I'm very disappointed in Anna Chalmers, who wrote the article. Why could she not ask how the most obvious question: how would this database of ID numbers actually solve the alleged problems?

Folks, I've worked in IT for some years now. And this is a very familiar pattern. People identify a problem, put their heads together, and then come up with the answer: a database! Much time and money is invested in the creation of the database, which then lies unused while the problem continues as it did before.

Here, the actual problem is not a technological one. It appears that members of one agency do not talk to members of other agencies; if they do talk together, there is no committment made to action, nor any followup. Clearly these are problems of process, procedure and institutional culture. A database of children will not solve these problems. The same people who fail to pick up the phone will fail to enter information into the database. The same people who ignore pleas to take action will ignore warnings from reports run on the database - if any ever are run. And in a few years' time, once the database is operational, we will be holding enquiries to find out how some new tragedy could have been avoided if only people had used the database properly...

In other words, what we have here is a failure to communicate. Mind you, technology can be really good at fixing such problems, if the barriers to communication are physical. But if the barriers to commnuication are institutional or cultural or social, technology is powerless. Which makes this database a simple non-solution to the wrong problem.

So why has this proposal appeared? Institutional imperatives; the growing temptation for states to spy on their own citizens; the innate desire of bureacrats everywhere to spend large sums on impressive objects, rather than attempt the difficult task of banging heads together; or Rodger's Something Syllogism ("We must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do this!"). Take your pick. But Anna, if you ever read this, perhaps you could find out?

The cool kids are into Ruby on Rails, but I've only just forgiven myself for leaving Perl and taking up with that Python hussy. I'm having a LOT of fun tootling with CherryPy, which has to be the simplest possible Python application server ever.

Print media have been slow to acknowledge one of the great things the internet has done for them, namely eliminate the cost of sourcing news items for the weird shit column. The Herald is steadily republishing items garnered from blogs -- recently I noticed BoingBoing and Monkeyfilter items appearing within a day -- without attribution on the back page of the front section. Not really cricket, in my view.

Mate, this is New Zealand. We do not have Mom and Pop operations. They're Mum and Dad operations. You know that.

And how could you let said operation get away with saying they don't have employment contracts with their staff? If they don't have contracts then of course they'll have trouble sacking workers. Jeez, my sympathy evaporated entirely.

It's harder than it looks to write joky, self-deprecating stories using your own tales of failure as a hook. Getting this right is the Royal Road to Readership.

I have decided that I won't be buying the Herald on Sunday, that completely different paper with no relationship to the existing New Zealand Herald, until they get their shit together and allow their workers to join a union.

Although I've pretty much lost faith in Scoop as a credible source of news, this shameful story sounds all too believeable.

Likewise, my intermittent purchases of the National Business Review will now cease in favour of the Independent. They may have an editorial stance but it doesn't seem to extend to distorting the truth in support of the publisher's mates. And Barry Colman was once mean to my late Mum. Seriously, some basic sense of proportion and veracity is desireable in a business paper, lest I go long where their advice comes up short. And here's a tip, lads: if it's five years old, it isn't news. Note the section: "Bsiness Today".

And tomorrow I'm going to write an extended diatribe about Bro'Town, Goldberg and icebergs, and whether Ali G is insulting Kazakhs everywhere. Promise.